Links tagged “400”

It may not be obvious while lying in the sun on a hot summer’s day, but a considerable amount of heat is also coming from below you – emanating from deep within the Earth. This heat is equivalent to more than three times the total power consumption of the entire world and drives important geological processes, such as the movement of tectonic plates and the flow of magma near the surface of the Earth. But despite this, where exactly up to half of this heat actually comes from is a mystery.

The Sun as climate driver is repeatedly discussed in the literature but proofs are often weak. In order to elucidate the solar influence, we have used a large number of temperature proxies worldwide to construct a global temperature mean G7 over the last 2000 years. The Fourier spectrum of G7 shows the strongest components as ~1000-, ~460-, and ~190 - year periods whereas other cycles of the individual proxies are considerably weaker. The G7 temperature extrema coincide with the Roman, medieval, and present optima as well as the well-known minimum of AD 1450 during the Little Ice Age. We note that the temperature increase of the late 19th and 20th century is represented by the harmonic temperature representation, and thus is of pure multiperiodic nature. It can be expected that the periodicity of G7, lasting 2000 years so far, will persist also for the foreseeable future. It predicts a temperature drop from present to AD 2050, a slight rise from 2050 to 2130, and a further drop from AD 2130 to 2200. --Horst-Joachim Lüdecke and Carl-Otto Weiss, The Open Atmospheric Science Journal (11) 2017.

It may seem counterintuitive, but cleaner air could actually be exacerbating global warming trends. The soot and other particles that make up air pollution tend to scatter light back out into space. As countries around the globe have cleaned up their act, there are fewer particles to reflect light, meaning more sunlight is reaching the Earth’s surface and warming it, Martin Wild, a researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, said Tuesday (Dec. 15) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Yahoo News, 29 Dec 2015

Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: "Sec. Perry goes against the supposed consensus of scientists, it was not outlandish, it wasn’t a denial of a known fact. It was a valid opinion on an uncertain area of science. AMS, me thinks thou doth protest too much...The truth is, no one knows just how much of recent warming was human-caused, including those thousands of 'independent' scientists. They pin the blame on CO2 partly because that’s all they can think of, and we still don’t understand natural sources of climate change."

"Why did AMS stick up for 'consensus': 'All of the scientific institutions are going to jump on the bandwagon, with politically savvy committees agreeing with each other; they are in effect being paid by the government to agree with the consensus through billions of dollars in grants and contracts. If there is no global warming crisis, there would be little congressional funding to study it, and thousands of climate-dependent careers (including mine) simply wouldn’t exist. That money also trickles down to the AMS, which is paid to hold scientific conferences, workshops, and publish the resulting research studies in scientific journals. They have a vested interest in the gravy train continuing."

Meteorologist Anthony Watts: 'For the AMS to admonish Perry that there’s no room for debate on Carbon Dioxide as being the primary driver, is essentially to deny the process of science itself. Science is often right, and also often wrong, but just as often, it is self-correcting. If global warming hadn’t become such an entangled and messy social and political issue, it’s likely that science would have done some levels of self-correction on the issue already.'